Global Warming Alarmism: When Science IS Fiction

The pervasive hype that we are experiencing a known human-caused climate crisis is based upon speculative theories, contrived data and totally unproven modeling predictions. Much of this emanates from politically-corrupted processes and agenda-driven report conclusions rendered by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which is trumpeted in the media as authoritative gospel.

Fritz Vaherenholt, a socialist founder of Germany’s environmental movement who headed the renewable energy division of the country’s second largest utility company, was once a big IPCC believer. Recently, however, his new book titled The Cold Sun: Why the Climate Disaster Won’t Happen, charges the organization with gross incompetence and dishonesty… especially regarding fear-mongering exaggeration of human CO2 emission influences.

After serving as an IPCC reviewer for their report on renewable energy, he was stunned by the large number of errors and wondered if the other IPCC reports on climate change “were similarly sloppy.” This concern prompted Vahrenholt to dig into the IPCC’s 2007 climate report, and he was again horrified by what he found. He concluded in an interview which appeared in the German news publication Bild that: “… IPCC decision-makers are fighting tooth and nail against accepting the roles of the oceans, sun, and soot.” Accordingly, IPCC models are completely out of whack. “The facts need to be discussed sensibly and scientifically, without first deciding on the results.”

Many would attribute the beginning of rampant U.S. global warming alarmism with star witness testimony delivered by James Hansen of NASA, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), at then-Senator Al Gore’s Committee on Science, Technology and Space during the particularly hot summer of 1988. Then and now, Hansen’s catastrophic predictions (based upon highly theoretical and unproven general circulation climate models and subjective tweaking of incomplete and unreliable surface temperature data) continue to be a huge embarrassment to NASA.

In a January 29, 2006 New York Times interview, he charged that NASA public relations people had pressured him to allow them to review future public lectures, papers and postings on the GISS website. Yet in January 15, 2009 testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works-Minority Committee, his former boss John S. Theon, retired chief of NASA’s Climate Processes Research Program, took issue with the interference charge, stating: “Hansen was never muzzled, even though he violated official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it). Hansen has embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claim of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress.”

Theon also testified that: “My own belief concerning anthropogenic [man-made] climate change is that models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit”. He observed: ”Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modeled in the observations, nor explain how they did it…this is contrary to the way science should be done.” He then went on to say “Thus, there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy”.

On April 10, forty-nine former NASA scientists and astronauts sent a letter to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, admonishing the agency in general, and GISS under Hansen’s leadership in particular, for its role in advocating a high degree of certainty that man-made CO2 is a major cause of climate change…while neglecting basic empirical evidence that calls that theory into question. The group, which includes seven Apollo astronauts and two former directors of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, is dismayed over the failure to make an objective assessment of all available scientific data on climate change, charging that NASA is relying too heavily upon complex models that have proven to be scientifically inadequate for climate predictions.

Their criticism is well founded, supported by scandalous exchanges among prominent researchers exposed in e-mail files retrieved from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at Britain’s University of East Anglia. The communications reveal conspiracies to falsify and withhold information, to suppress contrary findings in scholarly publications, and to exaggerate the existence and threats of man-made global warming. Many of these individuals have had major influence over highly publicized summary report findings issued by the IPCC.

A GISS researcher confessed in one e-mail that “[the United States Historical Climate Network] data are not routinely kept up-to-date”, and in another that NASA had inflated its temperature data since 2000 on a questionable basis. “NASA’s assumption that the adjustments made the older data consistent with future data…may not have been correct.”

Another scientist warned, “It is inconceivable that policymakers will be willing to make billion-and trillion-dollar decisions for adaptation to the projected regional climate change based on models that do not even describe and simulate the processes that are the building blocks of climate variability.” Still another admits: “…clearly, some tuning or very good luck [is] involved. I doubt the modeling world will be able to get away with this much longer.” Still another modeler complained: “Mike, the Figure you sent is very deceptive -- there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC …”

All climate models, regardless how sophisticated, are hopelessly compromised when based upon poor global temperature records. Yet an e-mail posted by database programmer Ian “Harry” Harris reports: “[The] hopeless state of their [CRU] database. No uniform data integrity. It’s just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they’re found…There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy [surface temperature recording] stations…and duplicates…Aarrggghh! There truly is no end in sight. This project is such a MESS. No wonder I needed therapy!!”

Responsible science is expected to be uncontaminated by political policy agendas, however passionate those participants may be regarding personal ideological beliefs. That same reasoning should also apply to those who are empowered to sponsor and direct that science. All too often this has not been the case, as revealed in candid public admissions by influential government officials, international climate summit organizers and leading IPCC authors.

Dating back two decades ago to the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Climate Summit, which codified the U.N.’s central theme for the famous (or infamous) Kyoto Protocol, chairman Maurice Strong proposed a remedy to solve what was regarded to be a man-caused climate crisis. Addressing the audience, he suggested, “We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrialized civilization to collapse. Isn’t it our job to bring that about?”

Former Senator Timothy Wirth, then representing the Clinton-Gore administration as Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs, strongly endorsed using global warming to advance that cause: “We have got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”

Wirth, a former senator, had been instrumental in helping to set up Al Gore’s 1988 Senate Science, Technology and Space hearings. In an interview with PBS Frontline he recounted: “We called the Weather Bureau and found out what was historically the hottest day of the summer…so we scheduled the hearing that day, and bingo, it was the hottest day on record in Washington, or close to it…we went in the night before and opened all the windows so that the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room.”

Wirth now heads the U.N. Foundation which lobbies for hundreds of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to help underdeveloped countries fight climate change.

Also speaking at the Rio conference, Deputy Assistant of State Richard Benedick, who then headed the policy divisions of the U.S. State Department, agreed that the Kyoto Protocol should be approved whether it had anything to do with climate change or not: ” A global warming treaty must be implemented even if there is no scientific evidence to back the [enhanced] greenhouse effect.”

Christine Stewart, then Canadian Minister of the Environment, speaking before editors and reporters of the Calgary Herald in 1998, said, “No matter if the science of global warming is all phony…climate change [provides] the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.”

And as IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer admitted in November 2010, “…one has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth...”

While climate is generally defined in at least three decade-long periods, consider that James Hansen’s 1988 testimony before then-Senator Al Gore’s carefully staged steamy spectacle that stirred up a frenzy about an alleged CO2-driven climate emergency occurred only slightly more than one decade after many scientists had predicted an opposite crisis. One of them was the late Stanford University Professor Stephen Schneider who authored The Genesis Strategy, a 1976 book warning that global cooling risks posed a threat to humanity. Schneider later changed that view 180 degrees, serving as a lead author for important parts of three sequential IPCC reports.

Schneider candidly summed up what appears to be a prevalent IPCC view of scientific responsibility: “On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, on the other hand, we are not just scientists, but human beings as well. And like most people, we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that, we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of the doubts we might have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”

In other words, trust not what we tell you, but believe that we have your best interests in mind, because our intentions, if not our methods, are ethical. Accept what we tell you for that reason alone. If we have to exaggerate and alarm to get your attention, recognize that this is for a righteous cause.

I am a professor and endowed professor at the University of Houston where I founded and direct the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and head the graduate program in space architecture. My background deals extensively with research, planning and design of...